Proof of Consent of Participants and the Danger Click-bait F'U Posts.

In a recent post by @kyle, dangerous unresearched accusations were made against @steemgames and sister account @steemsports which turned out to be unfounded. Upon being presented with evidence, @kyle did retract and edit his post although judging by his continued comments, the witch-hunt may not be over and further damage was done to the participants and to the brand.

To clarify the situation, @walden approached @steemsports recently with the Steemy Games idea, to create further community engagement and create some visibility for participants, our team debated as to whether we should post this kind of game, some were hesitant but at the same time we did not want to hamper innovation since we are supposed to be an immutable blockchain community, and thus we were willing to experiment and see where it would lead.

However to be extra prudent, due to the risk of looking sexist with a male only writer, we first ran the idea past the @steempowertwins who were okay with it and happy to co-host along with @walden and we took the games a step further and included male contests as well to be politically correct.

Cassandra obtained consent from @mrs.steemit and one can see below in chat that she was directed by @mrs.steemit herself to pull any photos necessary from @mrs.steemit's instagram blog which was already public anyway. I'm sure it can be agreed that @mrs.steemit looks mature for her age and some of our team thought she was in her twenties, so one can be forgiven for selecting her 16 year old photo in the mix of all the others, the reason she posted a few more updated photos in comment was in good fun to stir up some more support for her campaign to win the votes and not to tell us we included a 16-year-old photo of herself that she wanted taken down.

Please see below for an excerpt image from the chat conversation between Cassandra and Mrs Steemit.

It is also good to note that on the Steem App Center (http://steemtools.com) there is a Steemy or Not app that is not offending anyone, it's the same concept, except for the fact that it is just not recorded on the blockchain.

In honesty the posts didn't fit with our sporting content and we decided to move the experiment to a separate account and still allow our writers to be creative that way, the previous two posts had gained a high number of views and support and even a jovial "cage match" comment from @ned so we decided to continue the experiment although in the new @steemgames account. The idea was to foster Steemian related games such as food contests and others on this account as well, there was no problem until @klye posted an inflammatory article about this and immediately the sentiment changed and the community got fired up with flags left right and center, after the settling of the dust it has been realised that it was a false alarm and accusation.

The Steemy Games post would have been good visibility for the contestants and others, @halo for example has not been visible for a while even though she has been posting often. As @smooth pointed out, his vote would go to her purely because of her dedication to Steem and her continuing to post even in the face of low post rewards, our team also discussed adding bio's to future games to let the community get to know the contestants better. One of our co-founders even contacted @halo in chat thanking her for her participation and dedication to Steem, pledging support for her future works and was leading up to inviting her to write for us to help supplement her rewards and stay around longer. Unfortunately instead of being uplifted, now she is partially in the center of a scandal in a heavily downvoted post because someone "cried wolf" for no reason.

There is a potentially scarey paradigm developing on Steem, where authors potentially run out of things to write and instead of creating unique content, it has become much easier to just create FUD and try take down other authors to redistribute rewards in part back to themselves and earn rewards on a nice click-bait post of their own in the meantime.

It would perhaps be good if the community and projects like the Steemcleaners stopped encouraging the F'U style posts inciting action against other authors, unless such posts are "Decline Payout" posts (such as this one) which signify that the writer is not merely trying to capitalise financially on potential misinformation and rabble instigation against other authors.

If we all as a community refuse to upvote content which promotes disunity, the community would be better for it.

In closing we do apologise if the Steemy Games offended anyone and assure you our intent was pure fun and engagement. We most likely won't risk any more of these games and the sad thing is we may be hesitant to innovate and now have to second-guess everything we try to do.

Sincerely,

@steemsports team